A2POLITICO: U-M and FOIA—the $96,000 Question

by P.D. Lesko

THE U-M FOIA official sent a letter requesting $60 to examine one month of that institution’s FOIA log. This was after I received a handwritten list of FOIAs submitted to U-M that covered a two week period and a letter which claimed that FOIA requests are, in essence, secret. As it turns out, the FOIA officer doesn’t keep copies of FOIA requests that are older than a couple of weeks. The University of Michigan’s FOIA officer throws away her FOIA requests. That means in order to find out who has sent a FOIA request in the previous month, it’s necessary to file a Freedom of Information Act request for the original emails, faxes and letters submitted to the FOIA officer. While the FOIA officer may trash letters and faxes sent to her, emails must be retained, by law.

This request for copies of faxes, letters and emails led to the letter demanding $60 to examine one month’s worth of whatever paper records she hasn’t thrown out and whatever FOIA requests were submitted by email. It’s a huge undertaking, voluminous: she received 50 requests in the month for which I asked to examine records, according to the response letter sent. Since 2007, the UM FOIA Office has received more than 400 requests each year, according to a 2010 FOIA Office report.

Just in case some of you didn’t get your degrees from U-M,400 requests per year works out to 1.09 FOIA requests per day. The U-M FOIA officer earns $96,000 per year, by the way, plus benefits.

The City of Ann Arbor not only keeps a splendid record of its FOIA requests in an tidy Excel spreadsheet, City Clerk Jackie Beaudry will provide a list of the FOIA requests her office has processed over the course of the previous 16 months without charge. That office fields between 3-5 Freedom of Information Act requests each day.

The Michigan Daily reporters have documented multiple instances of U-M officials seeking to charge hundreds of dollars for public records other universities provided free of charge. In 2011, the university’s student newspaper published a special report titled, “University charges high fees for public records. In that article, Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center said “When a university charges thousands of dollars to retrieve a public records request, it raises questions about how the school is managing its information, says — a non-profit that advocates for student journalists’ First Amendment rights.”

The U-M FOIA officer attempted to charge the Michigan Daily a deposit in order to calculate the cost estimate of the FOIA response. Charging a deposit to calculate an estimate is not permitted under the state’s FOIA statute.

“They’re supposed to charge you only for directly responding to the request, not for some incidental or tangential cost,” LoMonte said.

Accessing public records is a critical part of any newspaper’s job. Since its launch, The Ann Arbor Independent has made an effort to use the Freedom of Information Act to access a wide variety of public records, from police reports to emails and from purchasing card records to employee personnel files. The City of Ann Arbor, the AATA, the Downtown Development Authority, Ann Arbor Public Schools and Washtenaw County have all, at one time or another, attempted to assess abnormally high fees in response to our records requests. On the other hand, several of those fee requests have been waived or reduced upon appeal.

At U-M, however, annual revenue from FOIA fees assessed has risen annually since 2009 and less than half of requests are granted in full. Those are troubling trends that deserve scrutiny.